In 2003, the University of Rhode Island received a grant from the National Science Foundation to promote the hiring and retention of women faculty. The ADVANCE grant program expired in 2009 but the university continues to benefit from the program. All of the women hired under the program have remained at the university and five of them have been promoted to full professor.
When the grant program began, there were 44 women faculty in STEM fields at the university. They made up 18 percent of the total faculty in STEM disciplines. Today, there are 81 women tenured or tenure-track faculty in STEM fields. They make up 28 percent of all STEM faculty. This is higher than the national average.
Barbara Silver, an associate professor of research in the University of Rhode Island Labor Research Center, wrote the original proposal for the 2003 grant. She stated that “the ADVANCE Program really helped show how stellar and capable these women scientists are, and it helped dispel the myth that women scientists are inferior to their male colleagues. They’ve been so successful and it might not have been possible to hire them without the funds provided by this grant.”